The recently popular game Palworld sold 8 million copies in less than two weeks, and the reason for the game's popularity is probably because it combines Pokémon, Ark Survival Evolved and many other gameplay methods, and is recognized as a high-level stitching monster. There is also a manufacturer in the digital circle that has started the game of stitching.
At the end of 2023, MinisForum Mingfan released a very interesting product, they stitched a powerful Intel Core i9-13900HX processor to the ITX motherboard, so that the CPU originally used in high-end gaming laptops can also be loaded into the desktop case.
This product is the MinisForum AR900i. Before sharing my experience with you, I listed the general specifications of this product with **, and I will have a more thorough understanding of this product if I look down with these data.
Friends who understand hardware should be able to see how luxurious the configuration of this motherboard is, just with 24 cores and 32 threads, so many frames make ** saliva, are you looking forward to its performance?
This motherboard comes in an all-black color scheme, from the PCB board to the heatsink fins. Compared with common ITX motherboards, the AR900i motherboard has been enhanced in terms of heat dissipation, with a built-in quad heat pipe heatsink and an active cooling fan for the SSD bay. Compared with the smaller mini host, it does a better job in terms of heat dissipation, which can release more CPU performance.
The unboxing part is very simple, because it doesn't come with many accessories other than the motherboard. In addition to the various fixing screws and IO bezels, the largest accessory is the WiFi antenna.
The IO bezel that comes with the AR900i motherboard requires an additional installation of two more screws than the integrated bezel to strengthen the connection between the motherboard and the bezel.
The base of the WiFi antenna is designed to be wide and magnetic, so it can be easily attached to the iron case. This extended antenna is more flexible than an antenna mounted on the back of the chassis and can be placed on a desk or wall-mounted to reduce the impact on the wireless signal.
Memory interfaces. 
Most ITX motherboards will use a standard DIMM slot, but the AR900i motherboard uses a SODIMM slot, which supports laptop memory modules. The advantage of this is that it can free up more space on the motherboard for other hardware, making the motherboard more expandable.
The AR900i motherboard currently supports DDR5 5600MHz memory and can support up to 64GB of memory. I used two 16GB 5600MHz RAM for the AR900i motherboard, which is more than enough for gaming or simple cutting**.
PCI-E slot.
There is a PCIe 5 strip on the motherboard0 16 slots, which can be used to plug in a discrete graphics card. In order to test the performance of the whole machine under different configurations, the graphics cards used in this installation are Intel ARC A750 and RTX 3070Ti.
m.2 interfaces.
Speaking of mThe 2 hard disk interface is very exciting. The first surprise was the m. on the front of the motherboardThe designers on the 2 slots have added an active cooling fan, which will be quite friendly to the use of high-heat SSDs in the future, and there is no need to worry about overheating and reducing the stability of the hard drive.
The size of the fan is 50mm 50mm, the speed is unknown, and the operating noise is almost inaudible in the open state, and the noise is negligible when installed in the chassis.
Most ITX motherboards will only give one M. on the front2 hard drive bays, while the AR900i motherboard is directly crammed into two. All support PCIe 40 size SSD.
The fixing buckle of the SSD uses a quick-release buckle that can be plugged and removed, which is more convenient to install than the way it is fixed with screws, and does not require the assistance of tools such as screwdrivers.
The back of the motherboard also has two m.s2 slots, fastening and the front are the same quick-release buckles. This gives you 4 SSD slots across the entire AR900i motherboard, all of which support PCIe 40 specification, for users who need large-capacity storage, there is no need to worry about insufficient hard disk space.
Power supply and cooling.
The power supply port of the motherboard is next to the memory slot, which is a regular 24-pin interface.
The CPU has an 8-pin power supply interface, next to the SSD fan. The base power consumption of the 13900HX is 55W, and the maximum turbo power consumption given by Intel is 157W, which is enough for an 8pin port to provide stable power supply needs.
Because an i9-13900HX is integrated on the motherboard, Mingfan solves the problem of heat dissipation, saving users the trouble of installing the heat sink by themselves (the cooling fan still needs to be installed by themselves).
The number of heat dissipation fins is 51, all of which have been blackened. The height of the heatsink is about 37mm, and even if a cooling fan is installed, the overall size will not exceed 70mm, which can fit into an ultra-thin chassis.
From another angle, you can see that the heat sink has 4 built-in heat pipes with a diameter of about 6mm. Mingfan set the power consumption of 13900HX on the AR900i motherboard at about 100W, and it is very easy for such a heatsink to suppress heat.
The mounting holes of the heatsink support a 120mm cooling fan, the fan will not interfere with the memory next to it, and some of the wind flowing from the middle of the heat sink can also blow into the memory, and by the way, the memory is also cooled.
There is also a large heat dissipation backplate on the back of the motherboard, which is designed with grooves on the surface to increase the heat dissipation area.
After removing the heat dissipation backplate, you can see that there is a thermal conductive paste at the position of the South Bridge chip to enhance the thermal conductivity effect.
Behind the cooling backplate is the chipset of the HM770.
iO interface.
Due to the limitation of the size of the ITX board board, the number and type of I.O. ports are generally sufficient. The interface of the AR900i motherboard includes a set of 35mm audio jack, 25G wired network port, 2 USB 20 port, 2 WiFi antenna ports, BIOS reset button, Type-C port (USB 3.)2 gen2）、dp 1.4 interfaces, HDMI 20 ports and 2 x USB 32 Gen2 interface.
After installing the baffle, the entire I-O connector looks more comfortable.
The AR900i motherboard is very small, even smaller than a Switch. But because of the addition of an i9-13900HX, its performance is directly full. If you add a graphics card with strong enough performance, it is not inferior to those bulky desktops at all. Let's take a look at the real strength of the i9-13900HX processor on the AR900i motherboard.
For this installation, I chose three different levels of graphics cards: 13900HX GPU, Intel ARC A750 and RTX 3070 Ti to test the performance of the whole machine. Other hardware configurations are: Critical DDR5 5600MHz 16GB 2, Lexar NM 800 1TB.
The i9-13900HX has 8 performance cores and 16 efficiency cores, for a total of 24 cores and 32 threads. The maximum turbo frequency of the Performance Core is 540 GHz, the maximum turbo frequency of the efficiency core is 3At 90 GHz, it's a lot more powerful than the desktop version of the i7-13700K.
The 13900HX in 3DMark's CPU profile test had a 1 thread score of 1144 and a maximum thread score of 11708.
In the Cinebench test, the R20 single-core multi-core score was 782 and 10417, the R23 single-core multi-core score was 2058 and 27148, and the R2024 single-core multi-core score was 124 and 1494.
The comprehensive test results of Master Lu for the three different graphics cards are 13900HX-1701349, ARC A750-2106778, and RTX 3070 Ti-2237573.
The PCMark10's overall score is 13900HX-6376, ARC A750-8392, and RTX 3070 Ti-8567.
The 3DMark Fire Strike and Time Spy test scores are 13900HX (964 Fire Strike 2882), ARC A750-Time Spy (12874) Fire Strike (25748), and RTX 3070 Ti-Time Spy (15314) Fire Strike 30337, respectively.
The whole machine with 13900HX core graphics configuration passed 99In the 9% TIME SPY stress test, the CPU temperature was toggled around 40 during the whole test, while the GPU temperature was toggled around 50, and the maximum temperature did not reach 60.
Using AIDA64 for double baking, the CPU temperature finally stabilized at around 77, and although the temperature briefly spiked to around 88, the entire system did not experience overheating and throttling. It can be seen that the AR900i motherboard comes with a built-in heatsink and a 120mm cooling fan, which is enough to cope with the heat generation of 13900HX.
Mingfan's AR900i motherboard gives users a new choice. Compared with common ITX motherboards, customized hard disk and CPU coolers are provided from the factory, which reduces the difficulty of user installation. If you have a limited budget or prefer AMD's processor, Mingfan also offers an AR650i equipped with 13650HX, a BD790i with Ryzen 9 7945HX and a BD770i with Ryzen 7 7745HX to choose from.